Total fertility rate

It seems to be a widely accepted fact among demographers--professionals and amateurs alike (and of amateurs taking an interest in demography, too)--that, assuming net migration of zero, a TFR of 2.1 is the threshold a society must reach if it is to maintain its current population size going into the future. A TFR lower than that portends a numerically attenuated future; a TFR higher than that a correspondingly accentuated posterity. Since first seriously thinking about differential fertility rates after reading Pat Buchanan's Death of the West as undergraduate, I've lazily accepted the 2.1 figure without making an effort to grasp why it is such instead of being the putatively far more easily comprehensible 2.0. People much smarter than myself took no issue with the figure, so why should I?

Resolved to have at least three kids so that I can go to grave knowing that while my side has lost the war of the womb (yeah, I'm engaging in some oh-so audacious augury, I know) at least I'll know that on my little square of turf I advanced the cause, fait accompli be damned. Still, natal thoughts prodded me to finally want to understand why having two apparently wouldn't even qualify as fighting the forces of desolation to a draw.

Well, for fans of industrialized, developed, first-world East Asian- and European-descended modern market-oriented countries, the news, at least with regards to the figure required for replacement (actually realizing said slightly reduced figure is another story entirely) is good. Our replacement figures actually fall in between 2.0 and 2.1, and are, sans immigration, moving closer to the former and away from the latter with each passing day, thanks in large part to steadily increasing life expectancies and declining infant mortality rates. On the other hand, in more vibrant parts of the world, 2.1 doesn't cut it. In sub-Saharan Africa, in fact, it doesn't come close.

The lower maintenance mark for Icy places relative to Sunny spots results because TFR is a synthetic figure (meaning it is a statistical artifice rather than a measure of any specific population segment at any given time) defined succinctly by Wikipedia as "a measure of the fertility of an imaginary woman who passes through her reproductive life subject to all the age-specific fertility rates for ages 15–49 that were recorded for a given population in a given year". In other words, women who live to at least their fiftieth birthdays not only have to pull their own weight but also have to pick up the slack of those who bite the dust before hitting the half-century mark; more slack for the unfortunate ones who die in infancy and in prepubescence, but also some slack accounted for by those, in decreasing order, who die in their teens, twenties, thirties, and forties.

In the US, more than 95% of women who were born fifty years ago are still alive today (so those of you Xers and millennials who spend an inordinate amount of time speculating on eschatological matters--you know who you are!--stop it, there'll be plenty of time for that later, for now, worry about breeding). A societal collapse notwithstanding, the percentage of those born today who will reach the big 5-0 will be even higher than that. And while 19 in 20 American women born fifty years ago are still around today, nearly 199 in 200 babies born in the US today will make it through infancy.

Sex-selective abortions are another factor pushing the TFR replacement threshold up in other places relative to where it rests in the West, a non-negligible factor in the world's two most populous countries, China and India, nations where the total population sex ratio is more skewed in favor of men over women than nearly any other country on earth, the few exceptions being mostly small islands with large laboring populations like Bahrain (and the norm being a total sex ratio favoring women over men). Oversimplifying, if your tribe has 60 men and 40 women, if each woman has two kids during her lifetime, when the next generation turns over, your population will have declined from 100 people to 80. Conversely, if your tribe has 40 men and 60 women, and each woman has two kids, your tribe will have grown from 100 to 120. The female sex is the limiting factor when it comes to reproduction, after all.

Liberty and equality, stoics and epicureans

Just as there is an enormous amount of tension between the consular ideals of liberty and equality, so too is there in aspiring to provide the best health care available while simultaneously striving to make health care ubiquitous and universally accessible. Anti-Gnostic does a great job succinctly articulating as much, with the following excerpt of demonstrating particular perspicacity:

The whole point is that *old people are going to die* with probability 1. So let's take those evil capitalists out of the question, and assume for now that no innovative entrepreneur could figure out something win/win for his own grandpa. ... 

We are in the realm of social justice. Sounds so nice, until we answer the question: how much of your children's money do you want to spend on futile care for 83 year old Emma in Ohio? For 74 year old Bill in Texas? For countless, endless, unnamed others? 

Because you can spend ALL of your money on futile care [or, by extension, the government can spend it for you]. Literally every last penny.

Worth reading in full.

Abstractly, the strong appeal of liberty--potentially even stronger than that of equality in the much of the public's mind--is why, despite actual policy disagreements on crucial issues like immigration, I'm still excited by the rise of guys like Rand Paul.

Anyway, Heartiste first brought the above to my attention. Speaking of the galactic overlord, he gently censured his occasionally inimical dux for insinuating that the Game approach to classifying males has it backwards due to the tendency of betas to outbreed alphas (which should mean even more cleaning up by the remaining alphas!). At the risk of getting lost in semantic weeds, I'm fine granting the Manosphere its preferred terms and consequent definitions and then making empirical observations free of normative judgments from within this framework. Hopefully it's illuminating or at least interesting. All the better if it keeps our hero's skills at their sharpest.

To the extent that I'm grated at all by Heartiste, it's in his seeming celebration of what amounts to an ennui-inducing mix of realized hedonism and nihilism. His meaning is often as nuanced as his tongue is silver, and I suspect that beneath all the veils lies a volition more inclined towards using sexual conquest as a means to an end rather than an end to indulge in for it's own sake, despite protestations to the contrary. Oh yes he doth protest, but I don't buy it, which is why I'm compelled to play the role of affectionate gadfly rather than whiny hater.

This isn't all merely a philosophical rehashing of Stoic vs. Epicurean, either. You might not care about propagation, but propagation cares about you. It's plausible to imagine that in the not-so-distant future pleasure surpassing that coming to a "Super Alpha" on an A-game night will be made available to all on demand without any real life human interaction being required at all. Just as the reproductive edge has shifted away from alphas and towards betas over at least the last half century, so another seismic shifting in fecundity may be just around the bend. I want kindred souls to be ready for it.

Finally, a post like this wouldn't be complete without an added wrinkle or two. The data are a couple of decades old, but the GSS queried respondents in 1994 on whether or not they'd watched any pornography in the preceding year. Cross-referencing this with reported sex frequency, we find that men who had sex less than once a month over the same period of time were considerably less likely to have viewed pornographic material than men who had sex more frequently than that were to have viewed any (18.2% and 38.1%, respectively, N = 183). For more contemporary, if proxied, relevance, using male respondent data from 2000 onward, we find that men who report not having sex at all in the last year are more than twice as likely as men who enjoy it 4+ times per week to support an outright ban on pornographic material (36.9% and 16.5%, respectively, with a sizeable chunk of that 16.5% of 4+ times per week group presumably being comprised of social and religious conservatives). Pornography, at least from this angle, appears to be more of a supplement to real life carnality than a substitute for it.

Undoubtedly there are a lot of frustrated betas out there who would love to possess an alpha prowess with women, but there are also a lot of them who just aren't that interested in recreational sex (and I suspect the latter has been and continues to increase as a proportion of the total male population). This probably goes some way in explaining why the unending comment threads Heartiste generates are mostly populated by alphas echoing the taunts and diminutions of the beta no shows, who, while constituting a majority of the population, are far less likely to be found than sheer numbers would suggest. How much attention is this Silent Majority paying?

GSS variables used: XMOVIE1, SEXFREQ(0-2)(3-6)(0)(6), YEAR(2000-2012), SEX(1), PORNLAW(1)(2-3)

Destiny is child

++Addition++Do read Matt's comment.

---

Heartiste points to the writeup of a study by the tenaciously dissident Satoshi Kanazawa claiming to show an inverse correlation between IQ and maternal urge in women. In so doing, the former references a finding from the GSS showing that while fertility trends among women in the US are dysgenic when IQ is used as a measure, men appear to be treading water:

Smart and over-educated lawyercunts are a dying breed. Literally. I believe it was the Audacity of Huge [link mine, though presumably intended by that wily devil] who once tabulated and correlated GSS data to find that smart men have more children than dumb men, while smart women have fewer children than dumb women. I call this the “Alpha Male-Cute Secretary Assortative Mating” theory. You may know it better by its street handle: Female hypergamy. And… wait for it… it will be the salvation of the white race in multicultural miasmas.

Here's the post he had in mind, and the relevant graph (apologies for the atrocious aesthetics, but blogger was having a hell of a time uploading graphics at the time):

We've seen, from several different angles, that educational attainment specifically--rather than the intelligence it tends to correlate with--is where the robust inverse correlation with fecundity makes its bed.

The takeaway message for sharp guys with pessimistic views of the future of our collective demography, and consequently the outlook for modern Western Civilization as we know it, is to not make the perfect the enemy of the good and refuse to join the melee because to follow the aquila would entail condescending to fight alongside allies they perceive to be beneath them.

That thinking is suicidal. Demography is destiny. Find an effeminate, trustworthy, fun, sweet, mildly submissive girl desiring children to start a family with. If she's as sharp as a tac, great. As long as she's not an utter dunce, though, you'll still be striking a direct blow against the Idiocracy.

Incidentally, that's the only way such a blow can be struck--those like Heartiste who are sparring in the Circus Maximus and those of more modest abilities who are doing so in a wooden arena in Illyria alike are merely intellectual auxiliaries in the war against the Idiocracy. They may spur others to action, but they cannot win the actual battles on their own. We need you!

Baby-making among non-whites by political orientation over time

Marshaling evidence from the GSS, Jayman has thoughtfully and diligently looked at white fertility rates by political orientation over time. The tendency for conservatives to be more fecund than liberals extends at least as far back as the cohort of people born in the 1920s, and it has become more pronounced since then. Jayman argues this presages a future in which whites become, on average, increasingly conservative in their political outlooks. Given the partial heritability of political orientation, this is a plausible assertion (at least in a relative sense--the political ratchet seems almost inexorably to always turn to the left, with the consequence that oftentimes what was leftist a generation ago is considered mainstream today and what was conservative a generation ago is viewed as being totally beyond the pale today).

I've wondered, though, if the same argument applies to non-whites*. The following graph shows the mean number of children among liberal, moderate, and conservative non-whites by range of year of birth. For consistency, I used the same birth cohorts and years of survey participation as Jayman did:

Like whites, conservative non-whites have been outbreeding liberal non-whites for nearly a century now, yet it hardly seems obvious that non-whites have moved to the right (absolutely or relatively) over the last several decades, nor does it seem a prudent to bet that they will in the future. And the social-versus-economic angle doesn't hopelessly confound here--non-whites are moving to the left on social issues, not just on economic ones.

This epigone isn't an augur so I won't prognosticate about the trajectory of non-white political orientation in the future. I merely hope (though I'm not optimistic) that the political beliefs of tomorrow are recognizable by their ideological flavors rather than by the race and ethnicity of the person espousing them.

GSS variables used: COHORT(1883-1909)(1910-1919)(1920-1929)(1930-1939)(1940-1949)(1950-1959)(1960-1969)(1970-1979), YEAR(1972-2010)(1985-2010)(1993-2010)(2002-2010)(2006-2010), POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7), CHILDS, RACE(2-3)

* Referring here to those who selected either "black" or "other" from the three choices "white", "black", and "other".

Changes in birth rates by age cohort, 1980 to 2008

It's no secret that fertility rates in the Western world outside of Israel and the United States are below replacement level, and the populations in some developed countries like Japan and Germany have already began contracting. The US, at 2.06 children per woman, would be treading water if not for the country's net immigration level.

Sifting through new Census data, I came upon a file containing data on fertility rates by several characteristics of the mother. Although whites, blacks, and Asians have all become less fecund over the last thirty years [or not--please see Hail's comment below], their declines have been almost exactly offset by a rapid increase in the size of the more procreative Hispanic population, such that the total fertility rate in the US today is right where it was in 1980.

Also of interest are shifts in fertility patterns by age that have occurred over the last three decades. The following table shows the percentage changes in birth rates by the mother's age from 1980 to 2008:

Age	Change
10-14	(45.5%)
15-19	(21.7%)
20-24	(10.5%)
25-29	+1.9%
30-34	+60.4%
35-39	+136.9%
40-44	+151.3%
45-54	+250.0%

Women are having children later than they did a generation ago. The bulk of all birthing is still done by women in their 20s (see below), so the large percentage changes among women in their teens and thirties is less impactful on the whole that it might appear at first glance.

Educational romanticism and the accompanying societal desire that everybody receive higher education means more and more women are delaying childbirth or foregoing it entirely. The consequences are not only demographic, they are also health-related, as several risk factors for the child increase alongside the age of the delivering mother.

Now for the percentage of total births by age range of the mother in 1980 and 2008. Data are not available for women 40+ in the earlier period, so I estimated using simple algebra to get the total for the 40-44 and 45-54 age ranges, and then split that number proportionally in accordance to the most recent year in which births for women in those age ranges are recorded:

Age	1980	2010
Under 20	15.6%	10.4%
20-24	33.9%	24.8%
25-29	30.7%	28.2%
30-34	15.2%	22.5%
35-39	3.9%	11.5%
40-44	0.7%	2.5%
45-54	0.03%	0.2%

A plurality of births are now to women aged 25-29, a change from three decades ago, when women aged 20-24 gave birth most frequently. In 1980, women in their 20s accounted for 64.6%--nearly two-thirds--of all live births, while women in their 30s accounted for 19.1%, or less than one-fifth of the total. Today, at 53.0% of all births, women in their 20s account for just over half. Women in their 30s now account for 34.0%--over one-third. If these trends continue, in another generation it will be more common for babies to be born to mothers in their 30s than to mothers in their 20s.

Educational attainment and barrenness in the US

In the comments of a previous post on the relationship between fecundity and educational attainment in the US, Bruce Charlton wondered what percentage of women never had children by educational category, noting that in Europe around one-third of female college graduates are barren.

Fertility in the US is higher than that among those with bachelor's degrees, but at the doctoral level, nearly one in three women never get around to starting a family. There isn't much in the way of surprises (heh) across groups, but the GSS has tracked the same data since its inception back in the early seventies. So, for comparative purposes, the percentages of women of the same age grouping who participated in the survey from 1973 through the end of that decade and reported never having children are also included in the following table, which shows the percentage of women by educational cohort who reported having no children*:

Education	2000s	1970s
No HS	6.2%	12.0%
Less than HS	6.5%	7.0%
HS grad	11.0%	7.3%
Up to associate's	12.8%	7.3%
Up to bachelor's	21.3%	10.0%
Up to master's	21.9%	14.9%
Up to doctorate	31.9%	32.1%

No difference among those who climb to the top of the academic mountain today and those who did so a generation ago (although at that time they represented less than 1% of all women; today they comprise nearly 4% of the female population). A significant change has occured among those who attend college without going as far, however. The percentage of these women who are not having children has almost doubled in three decades, while among the least educated, the proportion who forego kids has been halved.

GSS variables used: YEAR(1973-1980)(2000-2008), SEX(2), AGE(36-62), EDUC(0-8)(9-11)(12)(13-14)(15-16)(17-18)(19-20), CHILDS

* No high school = 0-8 years of education; Some high school = 9-11 years; High school graduate = 12 years, Up to associate's = 13-14 years; Up to bachelor's = 15-16; Up to master's = 17-18 years; Up to doctorate = 19-20 years.

Educational attainment and fecundity in the US

The correlation between educational attainment and fecundity has been a topic here on multiple occasions. At the national level, the gender gap in education is a strong predictor of national fertility rates. As measured by the World Economic Forum's 2007 report entitled "The Global Gender Gap", the correlation between fertility and educational parity is an inverse .75 (p=0), far stronger than it is among the other measures of gender equality, including economic participation and opportunity (.22), political empowerment (.22), and health and survival (.01).

In the US, where educational attainment is near parity and shifting in women's favor, a strong relationship between educational attainment and having kids exists. The following table and graph* depicts this among baby boomers, the youngest generation to have passed reproductive viability, from responses given from the turn of the century on:

	Women		Men
Education	Children	n	Children	n
No HS	3.26	167	2.86	156
Less than HS	2.80	340	2.26	308
HS grad	2.23	1123	2.07	937
Up to associate's	2.16	1040	1.98	788
Up to bachelor's	1.87	842	1.90	742
Up to master's	1.67	391	1.75	297
Up to doctorate	1.39	155	1.95	222

Both sexes follow the trend of more school, fewer kids to send to school, but it is especially pronounced among women. This is not to insinuate causality. Pursuing higher levels of education proxies for a lot of other factors that influence fecundity, like a long-term career orientation for which children are viewed as a handicap. I'm aware of the point made by Agnostic:

The idea that female empowerment or education (as a route to empowerment) is driving -- rather than merely associated with -- the demographic transition ignores history. It started at least in the 1700s among the French, continued through what feminists would call the oppressive Victorian era, etc.

Nonetheless, the dysgenic relationship is discouraging. Though the demographic transition started before the contemporary ecumenical educational system came into existence, the association is self-evidently strong, and is plausibly accentuating the effect not only by reducing total fertility, but also through delaying fertility, a more furtive filcher of our future.

We need methods to speed up the educational process, like self-paced coursework and subject-specific standardized testing (think Advanced Placement tests for those in college) that allows autodidacts to receive credit as soon as they've demonstrated proficiency in a subject rather than after four inefficient months of spending three hours per week having it delivered to them at varying levels of effectiveness. Ideally, passing the bar would be the only requirement for practicing law and passing the CPA exam the only requirement for becoming a CPA. If this results in a perceived glut of lawyers and accountants, the respective tests can simply be made more difficult. While the relative value of high parental socioeconomic status will decrease and higher conscientiousness might as well, higher intelligence would be rewarded with more precision and young professionals would be able to get to work years earlier and with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars less debt on their shoulders.

GSS variables used: YEAR(2000-2008), AGE(36-62), EDUC(0-8)(9-11)(12)(13-14)(15-16)(17-18)(19-20), CHILDS

* No high school = 0-8 years of education; Some high school = 9-11 years; High school graduate = 12 years, Up to associate's = 13-14 years; Up to bachelor's = 15-16; Up to master's = 17-18 years; Up to doctoral = 19-20 years.

Demographics by state a generation down the road

Our children are our future, right? So we'd best have an idea of who they are. The 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores are out, and the companion site is laden with worthwhile data.

In the US, 12% of school age children are enrolled in private schools, so NAEP does not capture them. It's difficult to find a demographic breakdown of private school students at the national level, but using 2005-2006 data from the National Center for Educational Statistics, I calculate it to be 75.5% white, 9.5% black, 9.2% Hispanic, and 5.8% some other race (unless otherwise noted, "non-Hispanic" should be assumed to describe each category other than Hispanic). At the national level, public schools are 55.8% white, 17.0% black, 21.1% Hispanic, 4.8% Asian, and 1.2% Native American (2007 data). Thus just looking at public education stats slightly shrinks the size of the white slice of the Millenials pie, while correspondingly increasing the non-white share.

The following table presages the demographics of the future by showing racial percentages of the public school student body (8th grade) at the state level, ordered by the most important indicator of social failure (no, bigot, not low test scores, by the percentage of the student body that is white!):

State	White	Black	Hispanic	Asian	NatAm
Vermont	95.2	1.7	1.1	1.7	0.3
Maine	94.1	2.5	1.1	1.5	0.8
West Virginia	93.0	5.2	0.9	0.7	0.1
New Hampshire	92.5	1.9	3.1	2.2	0.3
North Dakota	86.0	2.0	2.1	1.0	8.38
Kentucky	85.2	10.9	2.7	1.1	0.1
Iowa	85.1	5.7	6.5	2.1	0.6
Montana	84.0	1.0	2.5	1.2	11.4
Wyoming	83.9	1.6	10.0	1.1	3.5
South Dakota	83.2	2.0	2.4	1.1	11.2
Idaho	81.6	1.2	14.0	1.7	1.6
Indiana	78.9	12.7	6.8	1.4	0.3
Utah	78.9	1.5	14.7	3.3	1.6
Ohio	78.6	17.1	2.7	1.5	0.1
Wisconsin	76.8	10.5	7.6	3.6	1.5
Minnesota	76.4	9.4	6.1	6.0	2.1
Missouri	76.1	17.9	3.7	1.8	0.4
Nebraska	75.4	8.0	12.9	2.0	1.7
Pennsylvania	74.0	15.9	7.2	2.8	0.2
Kansas	73.2	8.9	13.5	2.6	1.7
Massachusetts	72.2	8.3	14.1	5.0	0.3
Oregon	72.2	3.1	17.6	4.9	2.2
Michigan	71.5	20.3	4.7	2.5	0.9
Rhode Island	69.9	8.9	18.3	3.1	0.7
Tennessee	68.6	24.8	4.9	1.5	0.2
Washington	68.0	5.7	15.1	8.6	2.6
Arkansas	67.0	22.6	8.1	1.5	0.7
Connecticut	65.2	13.9	16.6	3.9	0.4
Colorado	61.5	6.0	27.9	3.4	1.2
Alabama	58.9	35.6	3.5	1.1	0.8
Virginia	58.6	26.6	8.8	5.6	0.3
Oklahoma	58.1	10.8	10.0	1.9	19.2
Alaska	57.1	4.0	6.1	7.5	25.3
North Carolina	56.8	29.0	10.3	2.4	1.5
Illinois	55.4	19.9	20.4	4.0	0.3
New Jersey	54.9	17.4	19.4	8.1	0.2
South Carolina	53.7	39.3	5.1	1.5	0.4
Delaware	53.0	33.0	10.4	3.2	0.4
New York	51.6	19.5	21.0	7.4	0.5
Louisiana	49.2	46.0	2.7	1.4	0.8
Florida	47.6	23.9	25.7	2.5	0.3
Georgia	47.5	39.2	10.0	3.1	0.2
Maryland	47.0	37.9	9.0	5.6	0.4
Mississippi	46.4	50.6	1.9	0.9	0.2
Arizona	44.5	5.6	41.6	2.8	5.4
Nevada	43.1	11.0	36.4	7.9	1.5
Texas	34.8	14.3	47.2	3.4	0.3
New Mexico	29.6	2.6	55.6	1.4	10.9
California	29.4	7.7	50.2	11.9	0.8
Hawaii	19.4	2.3	4.6	73.0	0.6
District of Columbia	5.4	83.2	9.9	1.5	0.1

("Asian" includes Pacific Islanders; "NatAm" = Native American)

Clearly Vermont, like neighboring New Hampshire, will continue to be one of the worst places in the country to live for decades to come, while California and Nevada will continue to get better and better!

Excluding DC and Hawaii, New Mexico is the only state in the US where whites currently do not consitute a majority. In a generation, several other states concentrated in the Southwest and South will follow suit.

According to Bill Clinton, this will be "good for America". I'm skeptical. But that's not the purpose of the post--relaying the data is.

HBD awareness as a civilizational aid

As Inductivist has previously underscored, a natural predilection for monogamy is probably being selected for, at least in Western societies where progressively higher levels of sexual equality and consequent increasing female advantage in mate choice has been the story for more than a century.

This isn't surprising. In Darwinian terms, women benefit more from serial monogamy than men do. Women are only able to conceive one man's child at a time. They benefit from having that man's material and emotional devotion. Men can potentially conceive a nearly unlimited number of children at once and are consequently handicapped by being beholden to only one woman.

Indeed, it is the one-trick ponies--male and female, black, white, and Hispanic--who are having the kids. Betas procreate more than alphas do. Further, married guys average as much sex as good game guys do. The beta move of partnering up gives in-house access that can even give Roissy a run for his money.

That does not mean that monogamy is supplanting polygamous behavior. The temptation to try and trade up exists for women. As social sanctions against acting on this desire have steadily dissipated, the socio-cultural environment is pushing against the biological advantage the monogamous enjoy. As a result, the level of sexual promiscuity over time appears to be steady-as-she-goes.

Those who prefer a monogamous society where most men have an active stake in the future should push HBD as a socially acceptable way of explaining and understanding human behavior. The view that children are blank slates shaped by their environment discourages a woman from pondering whether or not she wants her children to be like their father before following her vestigal instincts and letting a cad knock her up. If nothing else, she'd be more likely to thrill-seek with contraceptives and then make babies with a guy of higher quality afterwards. Who ultimately makes the babies is what's important for the long-term well being of society.

To reiterate, as a self-described HBD realist, I'm inclined to think the alpha-beta dichotomy is overblown. Alpha personality traits are generally attractive, but how realistic is it to presume that an introvert will simply decide to fool the world into thinking he's extroverted, or an agreeable person suddenly become consistently disagreeable? Are more than 100,000 years of honing the detection of desirable attributes in human sexual selection negated by memorizing some negs and vowing never to show indecisiveness? It has the feel of a unique business opportunity to make a six-figure monthly income from home.

A reader sent me a link (I've lost it, apparently) to Roissy's post on how to keep a girl once you have her, and my reaction was "duh"--I'd done something almost identical to the "I'm going to eat. You coming?" a couple days before. I regularly get complaints--real ones, where she's irritated at me for some condescending scoff I make or view I hold--from girls I know that I'm too self-rightgeous (which is has some overlap with, but is not the same thing as, being highly self-confident). Maybe I could actively alter my personality traits in real time (as I do here to facilitate openness in discussion), just as 'betas' could try to do so going the other direction, but I wonder how sustainable it is or how effectively it can be done, and at what cost in terms of cognitive dissonance.

That said, since I've already made this a sort of open book on pieces of my existence, I'll continue to occasionally report on things I've said or done that might be of use to those 'afflicted' by less social audacity than I possess.

Tracking political orientation by age group over time

Last week, NPR ran a story on a Pew Research report on the millennial generation, highlighting the age group's political liberalism. There is little in the report that is surprising, though I found this remark by the president of Pew Research to be prognostic value:

Mr. KOHUT: Many people, not just whites, I think only 60 percent of this generation is white. They have a positive view of government - a more positive view of government, at least, than other generations. And they even supported higher rates, relatively higher rates, such things as affirmative action with preferential treatment for minorities.

Looking down the road, when the up-and-coming generation is 40% white, what will the support-preferential-treatment-for-minorities numbers look like? Will the term "minority" continue to be translated as "non-white", or will it fall out of use as everyone becomes a statistical minority based on their racial compositions?

I wondered more generally whether or not the contemporary political liberalism of those under age 30 is an exception in recent history or a continuation of past trends. Over the last several decades, have young adults been as liberal relative to other age groups as they are today, or are those designated by demographers as millennials especially leftist in their outlooks?

Turning to the GSS, I used Pew's generational conventions for age groupings. Millenials are 18-29, Xers 30-44, baby boomers 45-63, and silents 64-81. Because I was looking back in time, the age groupings do not correspond to static generational labels, of course--the intention is to see if the political orientations of young people have become especially liberal in the last few years. Higher values indicate political conservatism and lower values indicate political liberalism, with 4 representing perfect moderation. The graph shows the mean for people in each age grouping by year of survey.


Still presumably riding the wave of the 60s, young adults tended to describe themselves as considerably more liberal than older generations did through the 70s, at which point the average response became moderate. Since the turn of the millennium, it looks as though those under 30 have remained noticeably more liberal than those over 30 (although only by about one-fourth of a standard deviation). So the Pew report appears to be capturing something not entirely predictable.

As time goes on, the under 30 cohort continues to become less and less European by ancestry. Looking only at whites, there does not appear to have been any detectable shifting over the last three decades, the apparent noise in 1998 and 2002 notwithstanding.


I suspect much of the liberal skew of young adults today stems in large part from the fact that they are, as a group, less white than older generations are. Neither whites nor non-whites are becoming more liberal or conservative than before. Instead, non-whites are more liberal than whites are, and they're coming to represent a growing percentage of the young adult aggregate.

Robbing Peter to pay Pablo

Intellectual leaders of the Democratic party fear that if President Obama is unable to salvage a health care bill that increasingly looks like it it's indefinitely stuck in legislative limbo, party members will be unwilling to touch it in the future:

"If Bill Clinton couldn't get it done, and Barack Obama can't do it, no Democrat will ever try again," said economist Len Nichols, health policy director at the New America Foundation.

...

"History is written by the victors, not the vanquished," said Chris Jennings, congressional liaison for then-first lady Hillary Clinton during the 1990s debate. "Failure would serve as the ultimate judgment as to whether this effort was worth doing."

In a recent VDare column, Steve Sailer linked to a handy report from the DHHS on the country's uninsured population.

The pertinent information I want to highlight follows. The index simply shows the ratio of a group's representation among the uninsured population to its representation among the population as a whole. For example, 48% of the country's uninsured are white (as of 2005, when the report was written) and whites comprise 67% of the population at large, so the white value is .72. A value over 1.00 indicates that a group is overrepresented among the uninsured population; a value under 1.00 shows that the group is underrepresnted.

Race
Hispanic	2.14
Native American	2.00
Black	1.25
Asian	1.00
White	0.72

Residency
Non-citizen	3.00
Citizen	0.85

The figures in the DHHS report are rounded to the nearest whole percentage point, so the range for the true value for Native Americans is enormous (2% of the uninsured, 1% of the total population--at 2.4% of the uninsured and .6% of the population, it'd be 4.00; at 1.5% and 1.4%, it'd be only 1.07) and should consquently be taken lightly. What is clear is that of the four major ethnic/racial groups in the US, Hispanics are the least likely to be insured under the current system.

Increasing tax rates on "Cadillac plans", forcing insurance providers to cover clients who are going to lose them money (those with pre-existing conditions), and expanding Medicaid benefits to everyone earning under 150% of the federally designated poverty line are real costs. And these costs are to disproportionately be borne by whites for the sake of non-whites, especially Hispanics. More specifically, with the specter of the amnesty apparition that was buried in 2006 hovering on the horizon and the total lack of credibility in all politicians' claims that non-citizens will be precluded from enjoying the health care bill's benefits, this means it is illegal Hispanic immigrants who stand to gain the most, primarily at the expense of white American citizens.

I'm too parochial to really invest myself in the debate. My employer provides me with 'free' full coverage that I never use and never plan on needing to use (like living forever, so far, so good!). Initially, I was intrigued by the idea of reducing Medicare benefits to cover the cost of the reforms, as just about anything that reduces Medicare payments--resources destined to have a negative ROI of close to 100%--is something I'm inclined to support. That's a moot point now, as the politically unacceptable idea died several months ago.

This, however, certainly encourages me to be more firmly critical of any plan to universally expand coverage. Like virtually all government programs not directed at those over the age of 65, it aims to take from whites and give to NAMs.

TUJ parses fertility data and makes remarkable discovery

Writing for OneSTDV's blog, The Undiscovered Jew takes a look at fertility rates by age range and finds that from the age of 30 onward, IQ and white fertility correlate positively at the state level. That is, the smarter the state, the more fecund its 30+ population. The conclusion TUJ arrives at from this is that efforts to extend the span of viable female reproductive capacity using artificial reproductive technologies are the answer to below-replacement white fertility. Aubrey de Grey's drive to retard (and ultimately reverse) the aging process promises to carry eugenic consequences with it.

In the comments, Richard Hoste points to the same concern Francis Galton had 150 years ago; if one group breeds earlier than another group does, even if the total fertility rate of each group is identical, the early-breeding first group will outnumber the late-breeders of the second group.

A simple thought experiment demonstrates this. If hobbit couples have two children at age 20 and elf couples have two children at age 40, their TFRs (2.0) are identical. However, after 80 years, there are ten hobbits but only six elves. At age 20 (year 20), the first generation of hobbits have two kids. Twenty years later (year 40), their second generation offspring have two kids of their own, just as the first generation of elves are finally having their children. So after 40 years, we have two 40 year-old hobbits, two 20 year-old hobbits, and two newborn hobbits, to just two 40 year-old elves and two newborn elves.

But total population share and realizing replacement fertility are two separate (albeit related) issues. TUJ shows that if the fertility of white women in their late thirties doubled and fertility of white women in the early forties increased eightfold, without any other change in the fertility rates of white women under the age of 35, total white fertility would be above replacement. Although the white population would not grow as fast as the Hispanic population, the absolute number of whites would accrete over time. The formidable problem of an inverted age pyramid already facing Russia and Japan, with Western Europe not far behind, would thus be averted.

The desire for well-adjusted, industrious young people to get to work making babies instead of spending their twenties and thirties obtaining academic and then professional success may be hopelessly quixotic. A la Idiocracy, it's not going to happen on a largescale among those of European descent. For those concerned about the sustainability of white populations, extending female reproductive spans and getting the aging clock to tick in a counterclockwise direction are two of the most potentially fruitful strategies available.